Purgatory And Prayers For The Dead.

Ordinary Christian said:

As far as hell goes I go with the C.S. Lewis description of the doors being locked from the inside, and if a bus bound for heaven made a stop in hell, no one there would what to climb aboard.

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Me too.

The Liturgist said:

Three is a lot. I know of places where there is only one Orthodox church, for example, St. George, Utah, or other places, for example, the Mojave River south of Boulder City, between the dam just above Laughlin, and Lake Havasu City, where the only Orthodox church, in Lake Havasu City, is an hour away from several populated cities.

That said Archimandrite Philip is part of a splendid monastery of the Antiochian Orthodox Church, which has a special place in my heart, and which in England has become the most popular Orthodox church for disaffected Anglicans, to the extent that they are nicknamed “Angliochian”,, not unlike the Conwertsy term used as a self-deprecating badge of humble identification by members of the OCA and ROCOR and certain other historically Slavic Orthodox churches, such as the Bulgarian Orthodox and Serbian Orthodox churches in America, and ACROD and the UOCNA, who are themselves converts, and not from a Church Slavonic-speaking Eastern Orthodox or Byzantine Catholic background.

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Of the three in my area, one is an actual church building and is Coptic, and is the closest to me. Of the other two further out, one is in a strip mall and the other is in the rural part of the county and looks like barn type structure from the outside. Not that that's a problem. I attended a strip mall church for several years once.

The Liturgist said:

Me too.

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I thought so.

Ordinary Christian said:

Of the three in my area, one is an actual church building and is Coptic, and is the closest to me. Of the other two further out, one is in a strip mall and the other is in the rural part of the county and looks like barn type structure from the outside. Not that that's a problem. I attended a strip mall church for several years once.

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I would go with the Coptic one, frankly, simply because the liturgics are likely to be better, and I happen to enjoy Coptic people. Also the entire Coptic Orthodox liturgy is available in the Coptic Reader app on the iPad, whereas with the Eastern Orthodox liturgy its a bit more spread out, to put it mildly (I am looking in the direction of my liturgical library, which has both Coptic and Eastern Orthodox books, but the Eastern Orthodox portion of it was massive, while most of the Coptic portion was either given to me or was inexpensive, and the Coptic Reader app, although you have to pay for extra content to unlock all of the services, results in me seldom reading it, because one problem with the hereditary disease I have is extreme discomfort handling paper due to hypersensitivity of the nerves in my fingertips; this is a problem that did not used to affect me, but has crept up on me with age, and it makes physically handling a book quite painful, so that I now read whatever I can via the iPad. In fact, there is a book on the differences between the traditional Latin mass and the Novus Ordo Missae I rather want, but its not available as an ebook - had it been available via Kindle or iBooks or Google Play or on Scribd I would be reading it presently. I intend to e-mail the author to ask him to publish it.

Actually given the value of my liturgical library and certain rare volumes therein I plan on having it backed up to digital media. There are some book scanning apps for the iPad promising, and I have an iPad pro with the nice camera, but it might be better still to have a book binder unbind the books, scan the pages using a high-res scanner, and then rebind them, and there is a local book binder who I used several years ago who is an artist, who was quite inexpensive, and repaired some of the rare books I have on railways.

The Liturgist said:

I would go with the Coptic one, frankly, simply because the liturgics are likely to be better, and I happen to enjoy Coptic people. Also the entire Coptic Orthodox liturgy is available in the Coptic Reader app on the iPad, whereas with the Eastern Orthodox liturgy its a bit more spread out, to put it mildly (I am looking in the direction of my liturgical library, which has both Coptic and Eastern Orthodox books, but the Eastern Orthodox portion of it was massive, while most of the Coptic portion was either given to me or was inexpensive, and the Coptic Reader app, although you have to pay for extra content to unlock all of the services, results in me seldom reading it, because one problem with the hereditary disease I have is extreme discomfort handling paper due to hypersensitivity of the nerves in my fingertips; this is a problem that did not used to affect me, but has crept up on me with age, and it makes physically handling a book quite painful, so that I now read whatever I can via the iPad. In fact, there is a book on the differences between the traditional Latin mass and the Novus Ordo Missae I rather want, but its not available as an ebook - had it been available via Kindle or iBooks or Google Play or on Scribd I would be reading it presently. I intend to e-mail the author to ask him to publish it.

Actually given the value of my liturgical library and certain rare volumes therein I plan on having it backed up to digital media. There are some book scanning apps for the iPad promising, and I have an iPad pro with the nice camera, but it might be better still to have a book binder unbind the books, scan the pages using a high-res scanner, and then rebind them, and there is a local book binder who I used several years ago who is an artist, who was quite inexpensive, and repaired some of the rare books I have on railways.

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I was going to visit the Coptic one anyways because it's so close. It's new. The building used to belong to a Lutheran church, and a Covenant church before that. I've driven past it zillions of times, including around 4 hours ago.





Those are images of it from Google.

The Liturgist said:

I explicitly praised the way Purgatory was clarified by the Council of Trent! You accuse me of a crime of which I am innocent of; my criticism is of the way Purgatory was taught before the Council of Trent in the Counter-Reformation intervened, and prohibited abuses such as the sale of indulgences.

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I wish you had been more clear about that. Thanks for clarifying now. The Council of Trent DID reform some of the pious excesses of earlier medieval speculation about purgatory. In fact the teaching is actually quite minimalist. They said there IS a place or state of purgation and those being purged are helped by our prayers. Period. Pretty simple.

sandman said:

Jesus would have to ignore many scripture ...

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Such as?

sandman said:

The praying for the dead really was not assimilated into Christianity a good hundred years after Jesus.

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Citation please.

sandman said:

Everybody has opinions ...but if I render any in my posts I will stipulate it as such ... My statements are biblical.

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Be good enough to share some Scripture thay supports your rather shrill opposition to prayer for the dead.

Xeno.of.athens said:

It looks like they've done a good job making it Orthodox. I hope your visit is good, and perhaps you'll find a good home in one of the ancient churches. God bless.

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A major determining factor will be what kinds of refreshments are offered. If they have free baklava I'm all in for sure.

Xeno.of.athens said:

We get free Indian, Philippines, Irish, Australian, Italian food

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No Korean?

chevyontheriver said:

I wish you had been more clear about that. Thanks for clarifying now. The Council of Trent DID reform some of the pious excesses of earlier medieval speculation about purgatory. In fact the teaching is actually quite minimalist. They said there IS a place or state of purgation and those being purged are helped by our prayers. Period. Pretty simple.

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Forgive me, i thought I was clear, since I expressly praised the Council of Trent and also declared my view that Pope St. Pius V was the first Pope (that I am aware of, at least) worthy of holding the office since some time prior to the Great Schism. It is possible there were other good Popes, but their status is obscure, whereas after St. Pius V I can think of a number of Popes worthy of veneration, especially St. Pius X and St. John Paul II, and also I feel that Pope Benedict XVI is immediately venerable. Orthodoxy lacks the formal process of canonization when it comes to declaring saints to have been glorified, which is why all martyrs instantly become venerable saints in the Orthodox Church.

Obviously if Trent had maintained a doctrine of Purgatory that I rejected I would have not praised it on that ground.

The only things that happened in the Counter-Reformation that I disagree with (aside from my concerns about some aspects of the Jesuit Order, although I can think of several Jesuits that I greatly admire and who might well be worthy of veneration, for example, Fr. Robert Taft, SJ, memory eternal) is include the canon suppressing rites less than 200 years old which was, in my view, needless (and the problems caused by the 17th century Jansenist “Gallican” liturgy not to be confused with the ancient Gallican Rite, which could have been suppressed without requiring a general canon, although conversely one could argue this Tridentine canon along with certain other statements accompanying the Missal of St. Paul V make the Novus Ordo Missae uncanonical, and many have in fact made those arguments) , and resulted in liturgical damage, particularly when churches that used regional uses that were older than 200 years old and thus still canonical, ceased doing so, and additionally, there was the matter of the Rood Screens, which the Franciscans and Dominicans campaigned against, and never included in their own churches, and as a result many of these historic works of art, which are the Western version of the Eastern Iconostasis, and which I feel should be installed in every new and refurbished Western church, just as the Iconostasis should be in every Eastern Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox church, every Armenian church should have the icon-painted Bema and Curtain, and Syriac, Aramaic, Maronite and Ethiopian Orthodox churches should use the curtains and iconostasis-like decoration of the partition between the Apse and the Nave.

Likewise I suppose my main objection to the actual decisions of Vatican II (as opposed to the botched implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium by the group lead by Annibale Bugnini, confusingly called the Concilium, but not actually appointed by or under the control of Vatican II), was the decision to suppress the ancient liturgical office of Prime.

Ordinary Christian said:

A major determining factor will be what kinds of refreshments are offered. If they have free baklava I'm all in for sure.

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The Slavonic parishes tend to have the best food in my experience. Also the Armenians.

By the way, in an Eastern Orthodox or Greek Catholic parish, when a Pannihkida, or requiem service, is included in the liturgy, the parish will be treated to Kolivas, which is absolutely delicious sweet pudding made from wheat berries.

RileyG said:

Praying for the dead has always been part of Christianity.

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Citation from anywhere in the New Testament in instruction or example, please

hislegacy said:

Citation from anywhere in the New Testament in instruction or example, please

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It will be interesting if there is a reply considering that doctrine is no where to be found in the NT but rather just found in the musings of Rome and Salt Lake City